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Contemporary Albanian-Italian Literature: Mapping New Italian Voices

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Contemporary Albanian-Italian Literature: Mapping New Italian Voices City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2015 Contemporary Albanian-Italian Literature: Mapping New Italian Voices Anita Pinzi Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1094 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] CONTEMPORARY ALBANIAN-ITALIAN LITERATURE: MAPPING NEW ITALIAN VOICES by ANITA PINZI A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 ii © 2015 ANITA PINZI All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Giancarlo Lombardi, Ph.D. ___6-1-2015______ _______________________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Giancarlo Lombardi, Ph.D. ___6-1-2015_______ ________________________________________________ Date Executive Officer Hermann Haller, Ph.D. Meena Alexander, Ph.D. Teresa Fiore, Ph.D. Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract CONTEMPORARY ALBANIAN-ITALIAN LITERATURE: MAPPING NEW ITALIAN VOICES by Anita Pinzi Adviser: Professor Giancarlo Lombardi This work thematically analyzes literary texts written in the Italian language by Albanian migrants in the last three decades. This recent body of works is here defined as Contemporary Albanian-Italian Literature. It is analyzed in its literary and theoretic specificities, while being placed in the larger contexts of both Italian Migration Literature and Italian Literature. Four major themes – namely memory, borders, language, and body – are analyzed through relevant critical theory in the areas of autobiography, post-colonial studies, Mediterranean studies, gender studies, and translation studies to show how Albanian-Italian literature lives at the intersection of multiple literary and theoretical discourses. While investigating a new migrant aesthetics which resonates of other migrant voices, this work registers both the birth of a post-communist narrative in Italian and the extension towards the East of the Italian post-colonial discourse. It is here argued that Albanian-Italian Literature, through its literary themes, socio-political implications, and linguistic displacement is giving a transnational quality to Italian Literature, intertwining it with a broader discourse on world literature. v Table of contents Introduction 1 Chapter One – Memory: From Autobiography to History 12 Chapter Two – Borders 72 Chapter Three – Language(s) 110 Chapter Four – Migrant Bodies 157 Notes for a Conclusion 203 Bibliography 208 Introduction The body of works broadly defined as Italian Migration Literature is a recently-formed, complex and evolving field in Italy, a nation that during the 1980s increasingly became a destination country for migrants coming from many parts of the world. The consequent ethnic and socio-economic transformation of the country was soon reflected in its literary community, with the first Italian-language publications by immigrants appeared during the early 1990s. During those years, authors such as the Senegalese Pap Khouma and Saidou Moussa Ba, the Moroccan Mohamed Bouchane, the Brazilian Fernanda Faria di Albuquerque, and the Franco-Algerian Nassera Chora published diary accounts of their experiences as immigrants in Italy, cooperating for linguistic purposes with Italian journalists or writers. Their works – now defined as the first round of Italian migration literature – rapidly attracted Italian scholars’ interest within the Comparative Literature field. Armando Gnisci, in his works Il rovescio del gioco (1992) and La letteratura italiana della migrazione (1998), first remarked on the social and literary value of a considerable and increasing number of immigrant voices adopting Italian as their literary language. Since then, this newly created literary material has been increasingly discussed – in Italy as well as abroad – for its definition, social and aesthetic value, recurrent tropes, and relationship to the larger Italian literary canon. Scholarship on this literary body has therefore been growing parallel to it, mapping these new narrative voices, which today count among their ranks nationally and internationally well-established authors whose 1 works are published by major literary houses in Italy and translated into numerous languages. This new literary material has provided, and continues to provide, an opportunity to investigate crucial literary and social elements, such as the relationships between these new Italian voices and the Italian literary canon, Italy’s postcolonial legacy, and a new framing of historical and contemporary Italian emigration. Within this diverse literary arena, the analysis presented here examines the works of Albanian migrant writers who have used the Italian language as a primary tool to express their narrative voices. Literary production by Albanian authors in Italian constitutes the most numerous collection of works among migrant voices, and according to BASILI, the online database for tracking migration literature, started by Armando Gnisci at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” those published, active authors now number greater than thirty-five. Among them are several whose works have been translated into multiple languages and have achieved national and international recognition. In terms of genre, Albanian authors have produced a multifaceted group of works, encompassing novels, short stories, poems, and extending beyond written artistic forms to additional media such as photography, videos, documentaries, and films. Clearly, this is a very diverse set of works that offers a multiplicity of literary themes and forms and these can be analyzed through a number of theoretical lenses. This exploration is therefore not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of the material. Instead, it is meant to draw out the major themes that the genre offers through the critical trajectories that it encourages, and thereby to evaluate the aesthetic and socio-politic relations this new literary material entertains within itself and with the Italian literature and culture from which it borrows the language. The similarity in linguistic choices, as 2 well as the recurrence of particular themes and critical trajectories with which this material engages, suggest the birth of an Albanian-Italian body of works, the specifics of which this examination intends to map. As per the title of this analysis, this newly formed set of works is here referred to as contemporary Albanian-Italian literature. As with any definition, its informing reasons need to be explained and its limits must be made clear. This material is consistently contemporary, since, as mentioned before, it has all been produced in the last thirty years. With the exception of the works of writers from the historical Arbëreshë communities in the south of Italy, the great majority of the material analyzed is a direct outcome of the 1990s Albanian migration to Italy that followed the fall of communism in the country. On one hand, these contemporary voices, along with other migrant expressions from other parts of the world, constitute the literary mirror of the ongoing transformation of Italy’s social fabric, an ethnic, linguistic, and religious shift that became visible in the 1980s, and that bore its first literary fruits in the early 1990s. On the other hand, these contemporary voices draw and shed light on a network of literary, economic, military, and political interactions between Italy and Albania which are rooted in a much longer history. Therefore, the Albanian migration of the 1990s and the literary productions that stemmed from it are the ground for a double reflection: while they register the beginning of a new era of relations between the two neighboring countries’ cultures and economic systems, they also register the existence of a long historical Albanian-Italian trajectory constituted by a multilayered interaction which has been centuries in the making. The Albanian-Italian quality of this material resides in a number of elements. First of all, it is meant to underline the biographical and physical movement from Albania to 3 Italy that concerns many of the authors analyzed here. While this approach includes the majority of the voices examined, it only tangentially reflects the reality of the Arbëreshë authors, who didn’t directly experience the same geographical displacement, instead taking part in it though the historical narratives of their families and communities. This is the case for the Arbëreshë author Carmine Abate, who channels the contemporary Albanian-Italian trajectory through the telling of the displacement of Albanians to the south of Italy in the sixteenth century. Second, the geographical passage from Albania to Italy largely corresponded to a linguistic passage, as the majority of the authors soon adopted Italian for their literary purposes. The linguistic perspective enriches and challenges the geographical one because authors such as Ornela Vorpsi, Ron Kubati, Elvira Dones, and Anilda Ibrahimi continue to write in Italian, despite their subsequent
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